Due largely to their versatility and adaptability, musical keyboards have become a more and more essential part of modern day music instruments. One other important advantage of the musical keyboard vs. the piano is its relatively improved portability. However, comparing with instruments such as guitars, the conventional keyboard player is still bulky and difficult to carry around, making it more inconvenient to the users and the band. While it is desirable to make the musical keyboard more portable, the presence of music keys limits that attempts to reduce the actual size of the keyboard player. Other solutions are thus important and one of such solutions is to make the keyboard players foldable or collapsible. In particular, it is much more desirable to make the two-level keyboard fordable because this kind of keyboard is usually larger and heavier compared with the single-level keyboards.
While several disclosures cover such designs, all the other teachings fail to address important aspects of the problem, except the current invention, which satisfies all the important requirements and confers other benefits that are outlined hereinafter.
Examples of related patents:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,463,925 ('925 patent) discloses an electronic music keyboard that folds in the middle bottom-to-bottom, and pivots in the middle, back-to-back. When fully open along both planes, the keyboard looks and performs in a conventional manner. When partially pivoted, the keyboard may be supported by an ergonomic belt, or standard means and played hanging from the body of the operator forming an adjustable, inverted “V” shape on a vertical axis. When fully pivoted, the keyboard may be worn over the chest of the operator and played much like a double-keyboard accordion. The ends form a carrying handle and the keyboard folds neatly into a carry bag. This device may also be fabricated from appropriate materials to act as a support for prior art small MIDI keyboards.
In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 6,875,913 ('913 patent) discloses a musical keyboard that is collapsible between a deployed configuration and an undeployed configuration. The musical keyboard including two or more modules, each module containing a different subset of a set of musical keys; and means for collapsing the modules from the deployed configuration in which the modules are arranged in a row to form the musical keyboard, the keyboard being substantially planar, to the collapsed configuration in which the modules are substantially positioned on top of each other.
In summary, various apparatus are known in the art, but their structures are distinctively different from the current invention. Moreover, the other inventions fail to address all of the problems solved by the invention described herein. One embodiment of this invention is illustrated in the accompanying drawings and will be described in more detail herein below.